Honeybee Collaboration

I once got up in a frigid December night to put a blanket on the honeybee hive on our deck. I do not know how to “keep” them or assure their thriving. But I sit with the bees and notice they find their way improvising amid circumstances no one bee or any one hive has encountered. I wonder what we could learn.

Late in the summer a hive that I thought robust was overcome by wax worms. You may have read about them because of their recently discovered capacity to digest plastic. They prefer eating wax and also spin a sticky web of yucky gloop inside the hive that the bees can’t overcome. The bees in this hive gave up, took their queen and fled about 100 feet across the circle underneath an empty hive box—a desperate tactic. I jiggered a way to get them inside a box but thought they were too few with too little time to build up for winter. I was not surprised that after the first frosty night, I saw no activity. And then I was surprised again when they mocked my despair this week coming and going with elan. I wrapped them in insulating foil to celebrate.

I wrapped the other six hives, too, after our state bee magazine reminded me that bees are supposed to be inside a tree surrounded by 3-5 inches of trunk, not our flimsy ¾” pine boxes. Anything we can do to keep the bees from expending energy is good the winter. I put a “sugar board” for nutrition and then added a “quilt box” on top filled with cedar shavings for warmth and to absorb moisture. I’ll do a final treatment for mites this week, blowing in oxalic acid to beat down the mites.

The only thing I don’t try is to coordinate anything. Nobody has ever tamed honeybees, though we humans subject them to bizarre circumstances to which they adapt as best they can. No bee coordinates anything, either. How bees think is as much a mystery as the how a three pound squishy mass in our skull “thinks.” Thirty million years with no boss, much less royalty. No executive committee. No “table” around which important bees gather to decide the future. And they don’t get tripped up by “perfect;” taking what is real and finding the way.

Many important humans are currently making such abysmal choices that the whole species seems locked in a doom loop. Artificial fears blind us to our real peril. It was hard for the “last chance” climate conference in Qatar to remember to even pretend to try. The honeybees don’t care, except that the horrible decisions include releasing plumes of toxic chemicals that make it hard for them to fly straight. It’s a small planet.

As the global people were squandering their opportunity in Qatar, some key people in our little city met to think differently about how our civic hive might work better. We brought in Monte Roulier of Community Initiatives, one of our Stakeholder Health friends who, with ReThink Health and We In the World, have brought the Vital Conditions framework alive all across the nation, even into the dysfunctional thicket of Washington. Honeybees have the Vital Conditions in their DNA; every single bee and every single hive knows what to aim for, not just what to fear. Fears fragment our focus, while vitality integrates. If every human—like every bee—had roughly the same idea of vitality and life, we would need far less complicated coordination. We would count on everyone buzzing to a roughly similar tune.

Even a small town of 250,000 humans is an ensemble of many hives, neighborhoods and overlapping zones of power and ways of being. Nobody can possibly coordinate such a complexity even when so much depends on working together. We burn energy and time trying to create a table with clear agenda, shared data, distinct roles of authority. But the more power is concentrated, the more energy emerges to resist. We, like bees, work better knowing the other hives have a similar idea of what to hope for. Honeybee organization spends little friction on forced coordination; entirely focused on adapting to the actual circumstances. Multiple generative nodes are way smarter than any table of self-chosen geniuses trying for a singularity.

Better to gather with curiosity about each other’s hopes for vitality, hopes for life. Food helps with coffee in the morning and wine later in the evening. Like hearts learning to beat together, common life will emerge.

At The Carter Center’s Interfaith Health Program we traveled widely to help complex communities find their way to implement the gifts of science for health. We spoke of a “limited domain collaboration” as a way of creating multiple nodes of aspiration without leaders quarrelling. I was not yet informed by honeybees, so I didn’t realize they figured this out 30 million years ago. It’s Honeybee Collaboration; giving credit where it is due.

Humans have less baked into our DNA than honeybees. This makes us more adaptable but also easier to miss the point, chase our fears and waste time on needless friction. Every honeybee is imprinted with the ideal dimensions and qualities of the cavity in which to build a good hive. Maybe the Leading Causes of Life which underlay the Vital Conditions are like that. They see the interplay of five facets—Connection, Coherence, Agency, Intergenerativity and Hope as a pattern out of which life emerges over and over again. Jim Cochrane points out that the Causes of Life are actively dangerous if captured by any one tribe, nation or committee. If informed by the creative imagination for the whole and animated by the energy we call Spirit, they find the way toward life even when all seems lost. But that is a lot less exact than the bees, with their DNA imprint of the dimensions for the ideal hive cavity (22 quarts, dry, with a 1 ½” hole).

The wisdom tradition of Islam, the Jews and later, Christians, thought the honeybees were the species closest to the qualities of God with the sole exception of humans. We emerged millions of years later, so we may be an experiment by God to see if a species without the imprinted DNA can be agents of life for everybody on the little planet. It’s a perilous risk, working barely, if at all.

But that may be the Christmas miracle. Kate Hauk reminded me of the poem by John Roedel:

Me: Hey God

God: Hello there, my love.

Me: It’s over

God: That’s not true. You won.

Me: How can you tell?

God: Because you’re still here.

Me: Barely.

God: Barely is all it takes. Barely is amazing. Barely is a miracle.

The bees longest day is Friday. Six weeks later, still amid the frost, the queen will lay the eggs that will become the bees who will leap into the Spring sky to greet the early blooming maple and redbud. Miracle.